Dr Conor O'Brien, founder of FitFone, overall winner of the NovaUCD 2006 Campus Company Development Programme
FitFone which has designed, developed and patented platform technology which when embedded into a mobile phone facilitates remote health and fitness assessment to assist in increasing an individual's life expectancy, has been declared the overall winner of the 11th NovaUCD Campus Company Development Programme (CCDP). The aim of the NovaUCD CCDP, which is sponsored and supported by BT Ireland and Enterprise Ireland, is to assist academic entrepreneurs in the establishment and development of new business ventures to commercialise the output of their research.
Dr Denis Dowling, UCD School of Electrical, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering and founder of Nanogrind, a runner-up in the NovaUCD 2006 Campus Company Development Programme.
The FitFone Exercise Physiology System, grounded in detailed medical and physiological science, is a health and fitness assessment application containing a Global Positioning System embedded into a mobile phone. The System measures an individual's fitness level on the basis of personal statistics (e.g. age, weight and height) combined with the time taken for an individual to complete an exercise such as walking a certain distance. Until now this critical information was not available to the population at large.
The founder of FitFone is Dr Conor O'Brien, a consultant neurophysiologist and physician in sports and exercise medicine and a lecturer in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He was chairman of the Anti-doping Committee of the Irish Sports Council (1999-2005) and is Chairman of the Irish Heart Foundation Council for Exercise and a former Irish Olympic Team doctor.
In the last eleven years over 125 projects and 175 individuals have completed the NovaUCD CCDP. Previous winners include AV Edge, BiancaMed, ChangingWorlds, ProfExcel and Vocal Health Screen.
Dr Pat Frain, Director, NovaUCD, said, "NovaUCD supports entrepreneurship and the establishment and development of new knowledge-intensive ventures. The CCDP is our main enterprise support programme designed specifically to assist academic entrepreneurs in developing start-up companies to commercialise university research." He added, "These new and innovative enterprises which have completed this year's Programme are critical for the sustained development and growth of Ireland's knowledge-based economy."
Two other projects participating in this year's Programme, Biontrack and Nanogrind were short-listed for this year's event and received runner-up awards.
Dr Matt Sullivan and Andreas de Stefani who are based in the UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research and founders of Biontrack, runners-up in the NovaUCD 2006Campus Company Development Programme.
Biontrack. Biontrack has developed a software platform called Proline which reduces the complexity involved in and accelerates proteomics' research. The software is very flexible and can be customised to meet each researcher's needs.
Biontrack, which delivers software solutions to support protein researchers in industry and academia is promoted by Dr Matt Sullivan and Andreas de Stefani who are based in UCD's Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research. The developed software arose from research funded by Science Foundation Ireland and Siemens in collaboration with UCD.
Nanogrind has developed a novel manufacturing processing technology which uses microwave heating as a processing tool for the fabrication of metal (nickel)-diamond composites. The founder of Nanogrind is Dr Denis Dowling, Director of the Surface Engineering Group in UCD's School of Electrical, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering.
